Inside Cambridge Analytica, Few Knew How Soon the End Would Come

Illustration: Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo

Sitting with a friend in a bar in mid-March, a former Cambridge Analytica employee said he was having a beer when someone texted him Facebook’s announcement that it was kicking the data firm off its platform “pending further information.” “I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my God,’” he told Gizmodo. “This is going to be insane.”

“I was like, ‘Man, what am I going to do?’” the former employee continued. “I won’t say the writing was on the wall, I didn’t necessarily think that was going to be the death of us.”

The social network’s abrupt announcement came just a day before explosive reports from The New York Times and The Guardian revealed that Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from millions of Facebook users without their consent. The firm was accused of misusing that data to help the Trump campaign target voters, but it denied any wrongdoing, alleging that it deleted the Facebook data once it learned it was obtained illegitimately.

Last week, both Cambridge Analytica and its parent company SCL Group shut down their offices. Cambridge Analytica announced in a press release that it, along with SCL Elections and other affiliate companies, had filed for insolvency in the U.K. with bankruptcy proceedings in the U.S. soon to follow. Gizmodo spoke with two former Cambridge Analytica employees as well as a source with direct knowledge of the company’s final days, all of whom requested anonymity to speak freely about internal company matters.

According to one former employee, Cambridge Analytica’s leaders informed the company that negative news was imminent before the Guardian and Times stories broke, but few could have predicted how quickly it would lead to the firm’s complete collapse. Cambridge Analytica had already faced damaging coverage—like when Julian Assange confirmed last fall that the data firm had reached out to WikiLeaks—so some may have anticipated that the Facebook news would be just another bump in the road.

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Just a few days after those initial reports, however, the U.K.’s Channel 4 released a damning video showing Cambridge Analytica’s then-CEO Alexander Nix proposing tactics to a potential client that included entrapment and blackmail. Even then, one former employee believed that while the video of Nix would be “extremely harmful,” it was nothing that a change of leadership couldn’t remedy, saying now, “No one had any idea that it would spiral out of control.”

Until the very end, Cambridge Analytica’s workers believed that the company was a collection of good, talented people simply entangled in a web of bad press, mismanagement, and guilt by political association. While speaking to Gizmodo, former employees disputed that Cambridge Analytica directly used Facebook data in its work on the 2016 election, seemingly viewing this relatively minor point of contention as the crux of the entire scandal—and framing the company’s downfall not as a reckoning for past sins, but the result of being unable to get its message across.

While there were clear signs that this time was different—with Cambridge Analytica’s leadership postponing major decisions and scheduling multiple board meetings—employees believed the company was financially sound enough to continue into the immediate future. “I knew that we weren’t long for this world,” said one former employee, “but I didn’t think it would happen as fast as it did.”

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Then, late last month, employees braced for the worst as a company-wide “town hall” was scheduled for April 30, and then rescheduled for May 1, before getting pushed back on May 2 every half-hour from 10am to 12:30pm. Ultimately, the meeting was rescheduled more than half a dozen times. While waiting for it to begin, employees adopted a gallows humor in the company Slack. One shared a screenshot from the movie Titanic in the internal chat service and another posted Spotify playlists titled “Hammer to Fall” and “End of Days” featuring songs like “The End” by The Doors, “Help!” by The Beatles, and (perhaps tellingly) “It Wasn’t Me” by Shaggy.

In the end, the announcement was even graver than might be anticipated. Julian Wheatland, chair of parent company SCL Group, explained that Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate companies were shutting down. A brief moment of levity came when someone calling into the meeting played a snippet of a cheerful song that starkly contrasted with the grim tone of the call. Less than two months after Facebook’s announcement landed, all of Cambridge Analytica’s employees were packing up their desks and turning over their laptops and keycards.

SCL Group did not immediately respond to our request for comment. Cambridge Analytica was not available for comment.

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In the immediate aftermath of the data firm’s collapse, many speculated that the company would be resurrected under the names of two other companies: Emerdata and Firecrest Technologies, Limited. Emerdata was set up last August—six months before the Facebook scandal errupted—and has a number of Cambridge Analytica executives attached to it, including conservative heiresses Rebekah and Jennifer Mercer, former Chief Data Officer Alexander Tayler, and SCL Group’s Wheatland. Firecrest Technologies, an Emerdata subsidiary, was incorporated in March of this year, with Tayler brought on as a director.

Earlier this week, however, SCL Group founder Nigel Oakes pushed back against speculation that Emerdata and Firecrest would be revived as a Cambridge Analytica 2.0, saying both were winding down. “It’s the end of the show,” Oakes told Bloomberg on Tuesday. “The whole lot is gone. There’s no secret. For anything like this to recreate itself, you need a team of people to work together but nobody is working together. Everybody has gone off to do their own things.” 

Former Cambridge Analytica employees echoed this sentiment, believing Emerdata to be nothing more than a holding company created in a restructuring attempt, and that without a number of key players, it would be doomed to fail. 

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“We were the ones that did all the work,” one said. “Leadership just picking up and going to a new entity, it wouldn’t matter. They can’t do the work.” Another former employee noted that Wheatland was on the business side, meaning he likely didn’t hold any intellectual property. And while Tayler certainly did, the former employee said he was “very dependent on his staff.”

“He doesn’t necessarily have the global ambitions that Alexander Nix and some people had,” said the source. “I am sure he is going to do something else along these lines but not recreate exactly what was done.”

Proud of the work they did for Cambridge Analytica, former employees offered different explanations for what ultimately killed the company, but none seemed to believe that their work was an abuse of the public trust—at least not any more invasive than existing companies brokering data. One cited Facebook’s rush to name the firm as deeply damaging, saying that the social network knew the news was coming “and wanted to protect their interest.” Another specifically blamed Nix’s personal arrogance.

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“The more that it sinks in, the more angry I am at the recklessness of Nix and his method of selling and sell-at-all-costs and overhype,” said a former employee. “That really did us in. I mean really that did us in more than Trump.” The source claimed that when Nix was pitching to clients, he kept the fact that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to develop personality models in his presentation, even though the company had long stopped using that data, “because he liked how it sold.”

Even if Cambridge Analytica is truly dead, there are still plenty of reasons to be kept up at night. The former employees who spoke to Gizmodo seemed to believe that the firm wasn’t a rogue actor, but rather a somewhat typical member of their industry caught in a media firestorm. While certainly a self-serving assessment, incidents like last year’s Equifax breach demonstrate how much of our data is out there—and how easily it can fall into unintended hands. When another shadowy data broker is revealed to have violated the public’s trust, workers at that company will likely be wondering why everyone’s picking on them.

If you are a current or former data brokerage firm employee with information about misused data, you can email me at melanie.ehrenkranz@gizmodo.com. You can also contact us anonymously using SecureDrop.

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About the author

Melanie Ehrenkranz

Reporter at Gizmodo

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  • Either these employees are staggeringly unaware of what was going on at their company, or they’re staggeringly dishonest in trying to convince people that what they did wasn’t a big deal.

    To recap, what happened was:
    1) Cambridge harvested the full Facebook profile data, including groups liked and all sorts of demographic indicators, of nearly 100 million American citizens who never agreed to share any of that with a company they’d never heard of, but happened to be Facebook friends with someone who had, under the guise of a harmless quiz run by an academic institution that actually spidered down to scrape the data of everyone the person taking the quiz was friends with. This by itself was unbelievably unethical, even if other companies have done similarly unethical things.

    2) Cambridge ran numerous utterly unprincipled campaigns to assist third-world dictators or wanna-be dictators using all sorts of unethical data gathering and dirty tricks, getting these jobs by specifically advertising to said dictators the amount of unethical data gathering and dirty tricks they could do.

    3) Cambridge, after spending months trying and failing to inflict Ted Cruz on us because all the Facebook data in the world couldn’t make him likable, signed on with Trump and became essentially the entire analytics department of the Trump campaign, including heavy use of Facebook microtargeting of the exact kind they repeatedly bragged about in public as free advertising.

    4) Cambridge reached out on multiple occasions, including with their CEO and primary funder, to Wikileaks in an attempt to gain access to stolen Democratic emails they knew were the product of a Russian hack. Shortly after these attempts, Wikileaks, a supposedly non-political non-American organization, began publishing the emails in strategically-staggered intervals designed and timed perfectly to maximize political damage from both the left and the media.

    5) The end of the 2016 campaign featured significant numbers of Facebook ads purchased in rubles and microtargeted directly to individual swing voters in Wisconsin and Michigan.

    These former employees basically want to say “we had nothing to do with 5), so why are we being railroaded?” This is massively disingenuous and they have numerous other sins to answer for, even in the incredibly unlikely event that they actually did have nothing to do with 5) and Russian trolls figured out exactly which Americans to target on Facebook and how to target them without any assistance from the Trump analytics firm that specialized in exactly that.

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      • Great post. Anyone who had any knowledge of what the creatures who ran this company were doing belong in jail along with their bosses.

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          • Maybe all the idealistic displaced Big Tech employees can continue working in this exciting and disruptive industry by driving for Uber, or delivering for Instacart? Or become “last mile” Amazon contractors?

            Technology is changing the world, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t continue to enjoy that surge of adrenaline!

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          • Truth be told, I’ve worked on something analogous (but on the scale of hundreds, not millions) many years ago . When a superior tells you to access a website, scrape all the personal info you can, and compile it into a specified format, the first thoughts probably isn’t whether this was legal. You’d just (naively) assume it’s been cleared. If anything, I recall thinking at the time how convenient it was that the data was just there, open and accessible to anyone. Thinking back on it now, I realize that site really messed up on security and the data scraping was, legally permitted or not, shady. My main consolation is that the data was mostly name, profession, address, contact info, ie details that are sold and exchanged openly nowadays.

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            • Exactly right. Not to say that previous comments were 100% off, I’m sure there’s some truth to all of them, but at the end of the day the ones who made the real money did the dirty deeds, didn’t publicly announce it to their minions and maintained that sharade until the end. Let’s face it, when companies like this fall apart it’s not the top that needs to file for unemployment.

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            • So, is this truly the death-knell, or just a scattering of the cockroaches temporarily before they regroup under some other banner and resume business-as-usual?

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            • Bell Pottinger down. Cambridge Analytica down. It’s been a pretty good year for the truth on some fronts.

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            • It’s sad when the people in the trenches don’t have the perspective to understand what they were really doing, or what effect it had on the world.

              Steve Bannon, with funding form the Mercers, willed Cambridge Analytica into being from thin air. He built a disinformation and propaganda machine to bolster Trump’s campaign by targeting the weakest among us, who get news from Facebook.

              Once the jig was up, CA was no longer viable (or needed) so it just melted away into the night. These people (Nix included) thought they they were part of a team of full-service election campaign mercenaries willing to do dirty deeds, dirt cheap. But they were never anything more than a con played on the American electorate and the rest of the world by Bannon and the billionaire Mercers.

              And now we have to live with what they did.

              Fun fact: ALL of the Republicans involved in the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, skipped the meeting with whistle blower Christopher Wylie, in favor of attending a meeting the next day about how Diamond and Silk were censored by Facebook, so they are absolutely not interested in ensuring the integrity of the American electoral process, or even in having a legitimate, democratically elected government.

              Honestly, it’s time to take America back from the people who took back America, because they’re fucking it all up

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            Facebook Admits to Major Screw-Up That Silently Unblocked People Without Asking

            Source: Facebook

            Facebook disclosed a new “bug” on Monday that temporarily let some users who’d been blocked on the service send messages to the people who had blocked them. The bug also let some previously-blocked users view posts that were shared “to a wider audience,” such as publicly or with friends of friends, Facebook said.

            Facebook’s privacy boss Erin Egan apologized for the error, writing in a blog that the company is reaching out to “over 800,000" users about the screw-up. The “blocking bug” was active between May 29 and June 5, for eight days, though the company now says Messenger should be acting normally.

            Egan’s post details the features of this newly disclosed bug.

            • It did not reinstate any friend connections that had been severed;
            • 83% of people affected by the bug had only one person they had blocked temporarily unblocked; and
            • Someone who was unblocked might have been able to contact people on Messenger who had blocked them.

            It isn’t clear when Facebook discovered the bug or how many people were actually contacted by the people they’d blocked. It’d be interesting to know if Facebook discovered the issue itself, or after users complained about unblocking. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information.

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            Facebook’s announcement post closes by mentioning the serious consequences of a faulty blocking system, chiefly harassment or bullying, both significant issues that are exacerbated when platforms make mistakes like this.

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            A Bug in Samsung's Default Texting App Is Sending Random Pics to Other People

            Photo: Sam Rutherford (Gizmodo)

            Sending pictures to others is one of the most basic functions of a smartphone, but when your phone’s texting app starts randomly pushing out photos without your knowledge, you got a problem.

            And unfortunately, according to a smattering of complaints on Reddit and the official Samsung forums, it seems that’s exactly what happened to a handful of Samsung phone users, including owners of late model devices such as the Galaxy Note 8 and Galaxy S9.

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            According to user reports, the problem stems from Samsung Messages, the default texting app on Galaxy devices, which (for reasons that haven’t been determined), is erroneously sending pictures stored on the devices to random contacts via SMS. One user on Reddit even claims that instead of sending one pic, Samsung Messages sent out their entire photo gallery to a contact in the middle of the night.

            Luckily for that person (or maybe not), those pictures were sent to their partner. But for others who may have had pics sent to more sensitive recipients like a business partner or boss, the bug could give other people an unwanted peek into their private life.

            The scariest part about this bug is that when Samsung Messages bugs out sends pics to other people, it reportedly doesn’t leave any evidence of it doing so, which means people may not know their photos have been released into the wild until it’s too late.

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            Currently, the prevailing theory as to what’s causing this bug is a weird interaction between Samsung Messages and recent RCS profile updates that have rolled out on carriers including T-Mobile. The goal of RCS (Rich Communication Services) is to enhance the outdated SMS protocol with new features like better media sharing, typing indicators, and read receipts. The issue right now is that it seems something about the way RCS is handled in Samsung Messages is messing all that up.

            Asked for comment, Samsung sent Gizmodo a statement, saying, “We are aware of the reports regarding this matter and our technical teams are looking into it. Concerned customers are encouraged to contact us directly at 1-800-SAMSUNG.” We also reached out to T-Mobile, which responded by referring users back to Samsung, saying, “It’s not a T-Mobile issue.”

            In the meantime, for Samsung owners concerned that their phone might be sending sensitive pics to random contacts, there are currently two main fixes to this. The first is to go into your phone’s app settings and revoke Samsung Messages’ ability to access storage. Until a real solution is released, this will prevent Messages from sending photos or anything else stored on your device, whether you want it to or not.

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            The other option is to switch to a different texting app like Android Messages or Textra, which don’t seem effected by whatever is plaguing Samsung’s texting app (so far). Hopefully, this issue gets resolved quickly, because until it does, there’s no guarantee of privacy for people using Samsung’s default texting app.

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            Sam Rutherford

            Senior reporter at Gizmodo, formerly Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag. Was an archery instructor and a penguin trainer before that.

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